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Featured in Development

As part of our core values of sharing knowledge, the InfoQ editors were keen to capture and share our book and article recommendations for 2018, so that others can benefit from this too. In this second part we are sharing the final batch of recommendations

Featured in Architecture & Design

Tanya Reilly discusses her research into how the fire code evolved in New York and draws on some of the parallels she sees in software. Along the way, she discusses what it means to be an SRE, what effective aspects of the role might look like, and her opinions on what we as an industry should be doing to prevent disasters.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Mik Kersten has published a book, Project to Product, in which he describes a framework for delivering products in the age of software. Drawing on research and experience with many organisations across a wide range of industries, he presents the Flow Framework™ as a way for organisations to adapt their product delivery to the speed of the market.

Featured in DevOps

The fact that machine learning development focuses on hyperparameter tuning and data pipelines does not mean that we need to reinvent the wheel or look for a completely new way. According to Thiago de Faria, DevOps lays a strong foundation: culture change to support experimentation, continuous evaluation, sharing, abstraction layers, observability, and working in products and services.

Visual Studio 15.4 Released, Increasing Multiplatform Support

The 4th update to Visual Studio 2017 has been released by Microsoft, and continues the company’s commitment to supporting .NET Standard 2.0 and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps. .NET Standard 2.0 support is an important part of Microsoft’s strategy for promoting cross-platform application development and code reuse.

The changes delivered in 15.4 closely adhere to the preview Microsoft provided and for the most part represent evolutionary improvements. Within the IDE, the mouse-keyboard operation Control-Click has been changed so that holding down the Control key and then clicking over a highlighted line of code will navigate to its definition. This new functionality is available for C#, Visual Basic, and Python.

As promised, 15.4 includes support for the .appx container introduced with Windows 10. This provides a path for developers to take existing Win32 applications and package them into the .appx container for easier installation and management on Windows 10 based systems. This does not require your Win32 application to become a UWP app or to otherwise utilize specific Windows 10 functionality. However, it does make it easier to incorporate this functionality over time if desired. This new project type is available under the New Project dialog: Visual C# | Windows Universal | Windows Application Packaging Project.

Those looking to develop with .NET Core 2 will find it easier to do so as .NET Core 2 is available during installation and will be selected by default when either the Web Development or .NET Core Workloads are chosen.

Windows 10 developers building UWP apps will note that 15.4 includes support for the Windows Fall Creators Update (FCU). (As a convenience, the SDK for Fall Creators Update is included for installation when the UWP Workload is selected.) Assuming the Fall Creators Update is installed on your Windows 10 development system, you will be able to take advantage of several improvements to the XAML editor in 15.4. These changes include the ability to use Edit & Continue (live editing of an app’s XAML elements) while editing UWP apps and the ability to start using design elements from Microsoft’s new Fluent design language. (Note that the FCU must be installed and targeted in your UWP app in order to benefit from the new functionality.) Along with the new features is Microsoft’s indication that several performance enhancements have been made in an effort to make using the XAML editor faster and more productive.

Support for CMake has been added to Visual Studio 15.4. This enables VS2017 to support CMake based projects that target any combination of Windows and Linux platforms. The advantage is that this enables developers to use existing CMake projects without first having to convert them to a Visual Studio based project. CMake support has been upgraded to version 3.9.

Visual Studio 2017 15.4 is available for installation now and may be downloaded through the standard web installer or from within Visual Studio itself. In addition to the new features described above, several notable bugs were also corrected. Full details are contained within the release notes.